We waited until the doctor came. There was a deep graze down the side of the head—serious, but not dangerous; there was a cut across the cheek-bone that would leave a scar; and the collar-bone was broken. I stayed until he had recovered consciousness. “Lettie,” he wanted Lettie, so she had to remain at Highclose all night. I went home to tell my mother. When I went to bed I looked across at the lighted windows of Highclose, and the lights trailed mistily towards me across the water. The cedar stood dark guard against the house; bright the windows were, like the stars, and, like the stars, covering their torment in brightness. The sky was glittering with sharp lights—they are too far off to take trouble for us, so little, little almost to nothingness. All the great hollow vastness roars overhead, and the stars are only sparks that whirl and spin in the restless space. The earth must listen to us; she covers her face with a thin veil of mist, and is sad; she soaks up our blood tenderly, in the darkness, grieving, and in the light she soothes and reassures us. Here on our earth is sympathy and hope, the heavens have nothing but distances. A corn-crake talked to me across the valley, talked and talked endlessly, asking and answering in hoarse tones from the sleeping, mist-hidden meadows. The monotonous voice, that on past summer evenings had had pleasant notes of romance, now was intolerable to me. Its inflexible harshness and cacophany seemed like the voice of fate speaking out its tuneless perseverance in the night. In the morning Lettie came home wan, sad-eyed, and self-reproachful. After a short time they came for her, as he wanted her again. When in the evening I went to see George, he too was very despondent. “It’s no good now,” said I. “You should have insisted and made your own destiny.” “Yes—perhaps so,” he drawled in his best reflective manner. “I would have had her—she’d have been glad if you’d done as you wanted with her. She won’t leave him till he’s strong, and he’ll marry her before then. You should have had the courage to risk yourself—you’re always too careful of yourself and your own poor feelings—you never could brace yourself up to a shower-bath of contempt and hard usage, so you’ve saved your feelings and lost—not much, I suppose—you couldn’t.” “But——” he began, not looking up; and I laughed at him. “Go on,” I said. “Well—she was engaged to him——” “Pah—you thought you were too good to be rejected.” He was very pale, and when he was pale, the tan on his skin looked sickly. He regarded me with his dark eyes, which were now full of misery and a child’s big despair. “And nothing else,” I completed, with which the little, exhausted gunboat of my anger wrecked and sank utterly. Yet no thoughts would spread sail on the sea of my pity: I was like water that heaves with yearning, and is still.